Re: So I forsee a win7 upswing again

Re: I used to be like you

I wish I'd had you around when I tried out Linux Mint.... I could never get it to work properly without overheating grotesquely due to the fact that the proprietary GPU driver had been rendered obsolete by kernel upgrades and the open source one was quite frankly shite. It would have been fun watching you spend hours tackling that one.

Re: Much like fusion power

Re: what a lot of people..

"The same task on OS X is usually a walk in the park for anyone of any age, however - even nowadays Microsoft haven't managed to catch up in such fundamental areas."

Oh, really? That's assuming that the printer vendor has gotten around to releasing a driver for the latest version of OS X. We have a large Konica machine in the office here, for example, whose driver works fine under Mavericks but won't even install under Yosemite.... some walk in the bloody park. I told everyone to steer clear of Yosemite for at least a year, but did they listen? Nooooo of course they bloody didn't!

Re: So what's in it?

Re: Did you try?

I've been in the same boat with LaCie drives conking out - it has never once turned out to be the PSU - it always without fail seems to be the interface inside the case that fails, probably due to lack of adequate cooling.

Re: FLOSS nutter

"If a Windows user (more likely to be lay computer user) has a good experience with things like The GIMP or Libre Office, they are more likely to try a Linux distro."

I suppose it's _possible_ someone might have a good experience with the GIMP or LibreOffice but I'm having trouble imagining what possible arrangement of contrived circumstances could possibly lead to such an event....

Re: feature creep

Re: Alternative to Windows?

"Linux generally runs cooler than windows* in my experience. However I have heard of your situation with bad drivers running the graphics at full power constantly. It is the unfortunate joy of the card/chip makers not to support the users. If you are using AMD or Nvidia graphics you may want to try changing the driver in use. Mint should give you some driver options but if they dont work you may need to download drivers."

Genius! The damned thing has a Mobility Radeon - if that's running full tilt it would explain the whole thing quite nicely :(

Re: Alternative to Windows?

Okay, I bit - I downloaded Linux Mint 15 at the weekend, burnt a disc, and installed in on a somewhat idle laptop.

First time I've tried Linux in ages - sadly, it'll probably be the last....

Mint ran fine and looked great, but the laptop's fan NEVER stopped running at full tilt! And looking at the temperatures reported by the sensors revealed why - the damned thing was 10-15 degrees hotter than under Windows 7!

What gives? I posted a plaintive appeal for assistance on the Linux Mint forums, but either nobody has a clue or they can't be arsed :(

Re: We didn't throw netbooks under the bus, Microsoft did

Nope, sorry, the truth is that nobody wanted the original Linux netbooks, because they didn't run the users' familiar old apps; the average user wants MS Office, not half-baked tat like OpenOffice or LibreOffice or whatever that shoddy old abandonware calls itself these days. And neither did they "grind to a halt" when "the obligatory virus scanner" was installed; I had one of the Acer netbooks and it ran just fine under Win XP and just as well under Windows 7 as well, certainly better than the peculiar variety of Linux it came saddled with.

Or on the other hand, chances are that someone who hasn't upgraded OS X for 4 years is actually an old and experienced Apple user, who knows very well that each new version of OS X means more applications and peripherals refusing to work, and who wishes to stick with something that *just works*.

This is one thing Microsoft has always been good at, and which Apple could care less about, namely backwards compatibility.

Oh God Steam

Steam is great! None of this old-timey business of simply launching a game and starting playing! Oh my no!

First you have to wait for the Steam client to creak into life and then, if you're lucky (once you've closed the inevitable popup advertising a game you've never heard of) you can launch the game.

Of course, if you're NOT lucky, Steam informs you that it's updating whatever game you fancied playing, and the updates creep in at such a low bitrate it's obviously going to take a sodding hour, so you wander off and make a cup of tea and get distracted by the TV and by the time you remember you fancied playing a game Steam is either still downloading at a snail's pace or it's time for bed....

Eh?

Methinks you should go look out that ancient "How Computers Work" book and toil over it until you discover the startling reason why true computers differ from mere calculators (such as abaci). Or then again, you could just Google it.

How much?

Windows 7 Home Premium - when I bought it not so long ago - was an extortionate UKP 30. And that was a full version, not an upgrade or OEM. Newegg is not the be-all and end-all of online software shopping.